Monday, September 17, 2012

Crafting an alternative history

From the Ruins of EmpireBy Pankaj Mishra

RAJESH SINGH

Once in a while comes along a book with whose content you may
thoroughly disagree but still relish reading, simply because it offers a
compelling intellectual argument. This is one such book. Seventeen
years ago, Pankaj Mishra took us on a roller-coaster ride with his
delightful Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. If there could be a
truly desi book written in English, it was this chronicle of travel in
small town India. It had the feel and smell of the country and its
people that only the legendary RK Narayan could bring out through his
writings. At that point in time, few people would have realised that
there lurked in Mishra’s mind an idea that covered a domain larger and
more ambitious in scope than the mere idiosyncrasies of small town
Indians. Perhaps it did not then, because Mishra went on to craft a
novel titled The Romantics and then wrote some more travel
pieces. But all of these writings, though vastly different from one
another, had a common thread: The eagerness to explore the shifts and
twists in the cultural history of people in the course of their
socio-political journey. And, that desire has been given full expression
in his latest offering.
The author’s determination to re-look at the history of the East by
cleansing it of a Western perspective is admirable — though he does
claim that his aim in the book is not to replace the “Euro-centric
perspective with an equally problematic Asia-centric one”. To attain
that he has deftly managed the travels and thoughts of two 19th century
Eastern travellers-thinkers: The Persian Jamal-al-Din-al-Afghani and the
Chinese Liang Qichao. Both these men of thought had been disillusioned
by the imperial powers of that time which had been recklessly stripping
countries they had colonised of their wealth. Worse, the imperialists
had been rendering body blows to the cultural ethos of these unfortunate
nations. The choice of these travellers is not accidental; Mishra has
deliberately used them as sutradhars to pursue his belief that
such thinkers, marginalised by the rulers and thereby projected as
inconsequential, had in fact left a sustained impact on the people and
even to some extent determined the course of events that unfolded in the
decades to come.
Given the scale of the enterprise that the author has chosen to
undertake and the scintillating manner in which he has achieved that, it
would not be an exaggeration to say that From the Ruins of Empire is as important a book of our times as the recently published Why Nations Fail by
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. If the latter takes us into the
intricacies of how some countries have become rich while others have
lagged behind, seeking pointers from ancient culture to history to
governance for the phenomenon, Mishra’s work explores facets left
unattended by historians and academics largely because it would be too
much of a trouble to question those presumptions and develop cogent
arguments against them.
In his many interviews in the wake of the book’s release, the author
has emphasised that the time had come for all of us, especially in the
East, to emerge from the stranglehold of the Western theory. In a
conversation with Belen Fernandez, an author and columnist, Mishra
stated that the West had seen Asia “through the narrow perspective of
its own strategic and economic interests, leaving unexamined — and
unimagined — the collective experiences and subjectivity of Asian
peoples.”
Given his vehemence to revisit history in search of the ‘alternative
truth’, it comes as a bit of surprise and significant disappointment
that, when it comes to India, he should succumb to the very premise that
he seeks to demolish. For instance, he deals with the 1857 mutiny in
much the same manner that British historians and their Indian
counterparts by and large have done. The author believes that the
rebellion that almost succeeded had been an “eruption” of an “anti-West
xenophobia, often accompanied by a desperate desire to resurrect a
fading or lost socio-cultural order”. But surely the mutiny was more
than just that; it was an expression of a larger desire among Indians to
be masters of their homeland and their destiny. While it is true that
the assorted rebels drawn from the west to north were not as well
organised or equipped to take on the might of the British, it is also a
fact that even with such handicaps they did manage to capture major
towns and even Delhi where the Mughal ruler symbolically reigned and
headed the revolt. If they could not hold on to those gains, it had to
do with their failure to win support from a broader spectrum of the
people and the intelligentsia of the time.
A more refreshing perspective, which Mishra would have done well to
factor in his book, is offered in Operation Red Lotus. Written by Parag
Tope, a descendent of the legendary Tatya Tope who played a stellar role
in the mutiny, the book demolishes with new material many established
beliefs about the uprising. It can be said that Parag Tope’s opinion is
overly subjective, given his family connection. But then, it is no more
subjective than those of al-Afghani and Qichao, who had their own
reasons to be sore about imperial rule.
The other jarring point in the book is the short shrift that Mishra
gives to ‘radical’ freedom-fighter Aurobindo Ghose, who later
metamorphosed into a spiritual leader and came to be known as Sri
Aurobindo. He does acknowledge Aurobindo’s eminence, but only just,
picking some of his sundry quotes like, “Bengalis were drunk with the
wine of European civilisation”. It is not a remark that must have made
him popular in his home State, and perhaps explains why he has been
gently set aside when the country’s history is discussed. Apparently,
for the author — like for the British — Sri Aurobindo was a mere
footnote in the pages of history, while the likes of Rabindranath Tagore
were the central figures. It is true that Tagore influenced the
country’s political philosophy immensely, but he had one ‘advantage’
which Sri Aurobindo lacked: A greater acceptability in the West
following the Nobel Prize for literature that he won. Suddenly, he was
an international figure and had a global platform to propagate his
views. Still, it cannot be forgotten — and Mishra ought to have taken it
into account — that Aurobindo’s contribution was not merely restricted
to political awakening; he showed the path to ‘intellectual
spiritualism’. That legacy still lives on in the Auroville Ashram in
Puducherry.
Despite these warts, one has to heartily agree with Mishra’s concluding
remarks in his book: “The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless
economic growth — that billions of consumers in India and China will one
day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans — is as absurd and
dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al Qaeda.”

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About Me

Born in Allahabad district of Uttar Pradesh.
Brought up in Coimbatore, Cochin and Goa.
Lived in Goa for 36 years: from 1968-2004.
Worked in various positions at the Goa-based English dailies: The Navhind Times and OHerald.
Was Editor of a Goa-based TV news channel Goa 365.
Served as Media Advisor to the Goa Chief in 2002-03.
Served as Director of Information and Publicity, Government of Goa (2002-03).
Now, based in Delhi and working for The Pioneer as Senior Editor